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Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord

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Re: Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord

#11

Post by BoorishBears »

e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #4

As a bot dev, this looks very interesting but quite underpowered. Maybe I just hang around in gaming communities where custom bots are common for non-trivial tasks like querying game APIs, organising parties for different activities, etc where I don't really see this being useful. The cases that it does support, however, are quite helpful, and is currently only done by cobbling together a bunch of bots, as you said.…

That'd be a terrible place for them to try and build a business.

There's a limited number of games that have the audience to justify them going out and enabling that level of tight integration, and that audience tends to be too disjointed to make good customers.

Their current product targets the kind of audiences Discord seems to be angling for these days: niche groups outside of gaming looking for a digital meetup spot

Re: Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord

#12

Post by e63f67dd-065b »

sanketc wrote: post #5
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #4

As a bot dev, this looks very interesting but quite underpowered. Maybe I just hang around in gaming communities where custom bots are common for non-trivial tasks like querying game APIs, organising parties for different activities, etc where I don't really see this being useful. The cases that it does support, however, are quite helpful, and is currently only done by cobbling together a bunch of bots, as you said.…

Appreciate the candid feedback! We started with use cases that are relevant for most communities, and plan to build out the functionality to make it more comprehensive. We recently added ability to query external APIs, and triggers through webhooks (you can check out NBA's discord which has live game threads powered by our bot builder). But agreed with you that there is more work for us to do here. What sort of organ…

There’s quite a few things I’ve built or been involved in building (I just do this on the side, but I’ve had a few commissions and it’s all primarily gaming-based):

- Discord as a notifications service: perhaps the most common thing I’ve built, but it’s very common for there to be a lot of things that people want to be notified about (an activity that starts every x hours, just spawned, price of x just hit y, shop that has different stock every day has x today, etc) a variety of things. How it’s usually done is that a bot posts notifications to a central #notifications/#announcements channels in a guild and people sign up for roles so that they get pinged for notifications that they want. I’m not sure if you already support this, but it shouldn’t be that much work

This was before the whole follow channel feature, but that’s very limited and I would imagine this is very common even outside video games, as you said live game threads, pings for when a streamer/game starts, etc

- Ad-hoc wiki: a lot of guilds have what’s basically a few (or many) wiki channels, and I’ve been involved in turning that into a bot-controlled channel that also syncs to a website so non-discord people can access it and you can index, search, etc (see `pvme.github.io` for example; I wasn’t involved in building it but it’s very similar to stuff I’ve built)

I’ve wanted to build what’s basically a wiki that’s discord bot controlled (to bring the interface to where the editors are), but also a has a nice web interface, access control, etc. but never found the time or the motivation

- Database frontend - various different forms of “write these things into a DB, and then spit it back out in a nicer format”

- Crappy REST client - sometimes games have stuff that’s only hidden behind obscure APIs, so you just write a bot that forwards /commands to the correct endpoint and spits it back out

- Informal market - some features around aggregating price/demand/supply information for informal trading of game stuff, for lack of a better term

Edit: I completely forgot, but communities around streamers/YouTubers are probably a huge market. I haven’t been involved in that area, but I know friends that funded a nice vacation from building bots for these people. Stuff like patreon management, perks, moderation, engagement, etc that I see your service as a perfect fit

Re: Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord

#13

Post by e63f67dd-065b »

BoorishBears wrote: post #11
e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #4

As a bot dev, this looks very interesting but quite underpowered. Maybe I just hang around in gaming communities where custom bots are common for non-trivial tasks like querying game APIs, organising parties for different activities, etc where I don't really see this being useful. The cases that it does support, however, are quite helpful, and is currently only done by cobbling together a bunch of bots, as you said.…

That'd be a terrible place for them to try and build a business. There's a limited number of games that have the audience to justify them going out and enabling that level of tight integration, and that audience tends to be too disjointed to make good customers. Their current product targets the kind of audiences Discord seems to be angling for these days: niche groups outside of gaming looking for a digital meetup s…

Yeah I’m definitely not saying that it’s a good business to be supporting boutique bots for small communities, but there’s a very long tail of communities with a few thousand people that have some custom needs. Supporting them almost definitely does not scale at all.

But that’s the problem though - everybody uses a slightly different set of features, so the more you add the more people you get.

Re: Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord

#15

Post by sanketc »

e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #12
sanketc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the candid feedback! We started with use cases that are relevant for most communities, and plan to build out the functionality to make it more comprehensive. We recently added ability to query external APIs, and triggers through webhooks (you can check out NBA's discord which has live game threads powered by our bot builder). But agreed with you that there is more work for us to do here. What sort of organ…

There’s quite a few things I’ve built or been involved in building (I just do this on the side, but I’ve had a few commissions and it’s all primarily gaming-based): - Discord as a notifications service: perhaps the most common thing I’ve built, but it’s very common for there to be a lot of things that people want to be notified about (an activity that starts every x hours, just spawned, price of x just hit y, shop th…

Wow, thanks for the detailed use cases here!

- Discord as a notifications service - we do support aspect of it where folks can click a button to get a specific role (e.g. I want notification for xyz). We have a recurring trigger that can check an endpoint, and post an update from that endpoint. We don't yet support conditions on that (e.g. only notify if price hits x)

- Wiki - pvme.github.io looks pretty cool. I have seen couple other products that help convert community content into indexable pages. I like the idea of like a web interface where folks can edit, but the content also some how gets updated in discord (e.g. forums in discord could be a good use case for this?)

- Intra guild look tracking - this is definitely a little bit more complex than what we plan to support given it involves storing specific data for access at a later date. Is this pretty common for a lot of gaming communities?

- Crappy rest client - yes we can support this! Definitely get in touch if you find yourself wanting to do something like this in the future.

Re: Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord

#16

Post by sanketc »

e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #13
BoorishBears wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd be a terrible place for them to try and build a business. There's a limited number of games that have the audience to justify them going out and enabling that level of tight integration, and that audience tends to be too disjointed to make good customers. Their current product targets the kind of audiences Discord seems to be angling for these days: niche groups outside of gaming looking for a digital meetup s…

Yeah I’m definitely not saying that it’s a good business to be supporting boutique bots for small communities, but there’s a very long tail of communities with a few thousand people that have some custom needs. Supporting them almost definitely does not scale at all. But that’s the problem though - everybody uses a slightly different set of features, so the more you add the more people you get.

Absolutely! It’s helpful for us to keep the long tail of usecases in mind tho as we prioritize, so we can capture aspects of those. We’ll ofcourse never be able to replace a full custom bot. However, bots coded for specific uses come with its own set of challenges (eg. managing a backend server, logging, relying on someone else to update basic things etc.) which we hope to mitigate.

Re: Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord

#18

Post by tchock23 »

I don't understand why companies are building customer communities on Slack or Discord.

I kind of get it for consumer brands where there is a natural passion around the topic/product, but the last thing I want to be invited to as a B2B customer is a Slack or Discord group.

Who has the time to figure out the channel structure and community rules/conventions, get even more notifications, scroll through endless chat threads, etc. just to stay up to date or share feedback about a B2B product?

Am I just an oddball and don't get it? HN please help me figure out what I'm missing because I keep getting invited to Discord customer communities for B2B SaaS products and I just have zero desire to join, ever...

Re: Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord

#19

Post by shaburn »

tchock23 wrote: post #18

I don't understand why companies are building customer communities on Slack or Discord. I kind of get it for consumer brands where there is a natural passion around the topic/product, but the last thing I want to be invited to as a B2B customer is a Slack or Discord group. Who has the time to figure out the channel structure and community rules/conventions, get even more notifications, scroll through endless chat thr…

It's the worst. They are blackholes for information and search is funcitonally non-existent.

Re: Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord

#20

Post by pranavbadami »

tchock23 wrote: post #18

I don't understand why companies are building customer communities on Slack or Discord. I kind of get it for consumer brands where there is a natural passion around the topic/product, but the last thing I want to be invited to as a B2B customer is a Slack or Discord group. Who has the time to figure out the channel structure and community rules/conventions, get even more notifications, scroll through endless chat thr…

Hey, great question! I think a chunk of people like the immediacy of getting help over chat and find it easier to talk naturally with other members. In turn, we’ve seen people grow closer to the community and spend time hanging out there. However, I agree that it isn’t for everyone, especially if you’re mostly looking for support.

UX in terms of navigation, search, and configuration can definitely be improved, 100%, which is a huge reason why servers use us currently.

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